Non-Papal Bull

Entries tagged with computer

I am currently gussied up and looking mighty fine, if I may say so myself, for dinner with a certain elder Goth who isn't feeling well and so postponed. Not a date.

Getting together with Grenade on Sunday, about which I am psyched. Not a date either, but I sure wouldn't mind if it were.

I finally broke down and got an HP 6968 printer/scanner for taxes, insurance claims, and various kinds of circumflatulation. I did connect it to my laptop via WiFi, but I passed on the web-based print service because DANGER WILL ROBINSON. The printer/scanner is not intended to be used for dating, you freaks.

My father's brother has asked for my copy of the Navajo dictionary that his father contributed to. He wants to donate it to the historical site with which my father's family is associated. (I've been there once, in '89.) It seems like a good idea to me; I lost the thing for a few years, and I don't want to lose it again. Besides, it should be where people will see and appreciate it. Mentioning my uncle and dating in the same sentence gives me a headache.

Discussions for nailing down the venue for my 50th birthday party. The price, facilities, and general attitude of the proprietress are eminently reasonable, but there's one wrinkle: I'm not allowed to divulge the name (or, I suppose, address) of the venue until the day of the event. I hope invitees won't get too cheesed off at me about that. I'll be asking her if I can at least name the neighborhood, among many other things. This party is not a date, but it'll be my 50th birthday and I'll be in a fabulous leather corset, so I better get at least one good kiss out of it.

I have dates scheduled for Friday and Saturday night. If I don't survive, I'll die happy.

Fat redistribution: check. You may reasonably suspect that it's water weight, but remember that spironolactone is a diuretic.

Peeing more: check.

Reduced aggression: check. I'm yelling at the Wendling less.

Reduced libido & (ahem) flaccidity: check.

I've been a little more tired at night. This morning and only this morning a lot of my muscles felt crampy, but lunch took care of that.In other news, my whole feature team just got several person-months of work shelved. My shiny new boss says this is not normal at MyCo.I just finished writing AutoNag, a Windows application that plays a .wav after the desired number of minutes have elapsed, and will loop until the stop button is clicked. Best of all, it has a repeat mode. Mmu hu hwaugh huh hah hah!

I think I'll add a list-of-.wavs feature to it, so I can automate nagging for my son's whole morning routine. I may need to change the wait time entry to seconds instead of minutes.

After a perfectly Lovely time last night with choice alcohol, eats, and company, I found out that the ramp from the West Seattle bridge to I-5 was closed. I got to see Beacon Hill in the dark, and some parts of it twice. I'm glad that Nibs, unusually, was asleep and didn't notice my tardiness.

Idea: a web site that, given a route & a time range, tells you about present or future construction thereupon.

We got mail from my son's school today saying they've gotten complaints that my son has been riding his bike recklessly through the nearby high school parking lot to get to his junior high. That bears repeating: he's been weaving through cars in a lot full of teenage drivers and almost got hit today. He's been grounded from his bike, and the next two trips he makes to school on his bike will be with me. Dear Bob, his lack of executive function is bad enough, but this could have won him a Darwin award.

Oh yeah: his braces? $6300 total, of which we've paid $1500 so far. Those things better be made of titanium.SQL violates the principle of least astonishment with the frequency & subtlety of Prolog, and a destructive power exceeding that of any language outside of an OS kernel. And yet SQL somehow manages to be useful enough that people pay for it.

As I shopped for a new, non-maddening laptop for Nibs, I was reminded that my current home desktop computer, bought last year, has enough RAM to max out a 32-bit address space. (That's 4 GB for you civilians out there.) Back when I was a wee little graduate student, the mail server june.cs.washington.edu had the same amount of RAM. It was considered a hot server that never had to page and could meet all the mail needs of a 100-person department. I love living in the future. Icing? The laptop will have the same amount of RAM and a 64-bit processor.T-minus four months and one day to hormones. Dr. Shrink has warned me not to be too gleeful in front of Nibs. It'll be a struggle, but I understand the need.

The special sauce turned out not to be running the timer thread in the background after all. I now call Form.Activate (via Invoke) each second when I update the display; that's what it seems to take to make it work when the device is locked. I also raised the priority on the thread, which may not be necessary but does seem to keep me from losing a little time.

Also, if you want a numeric-only text entry box, you need to handle its KeyPress events and intercept letters & punctuation - not all non-numeric keys, which eats your backspace.

When a Windows Mobile phone idles, none of the threads in your app will get any cycles even if they're waiting for timers unless you tell the OS you really want to run your thread in the background no matter what (System.Thread.IsBackground, for you .NET folks). I wouldn't be surprised if this behavior also applied to any Windows installation that's configured to save power that way, i.e. laptops, which I've never developed on.

I haven't found an obvious .NET way to grab the screen and the soft keys if the device is locked. Yeah, this may be a duh because such a feature would weaken the lock, but I figure if the telephony and alarm apps can grab the phone, why can't I?

Bad: getting at sounds on the filesystem and playing them, especially WMAs, is pretty klunky. I opted to make my timer, when it goes off, just play the system beep in a loop on the same thread that counts down the seconds.

Tonight: Manos et al @ Lo-Fi. Cheap, local techno.Tomorrow: Thrifting @ Shoreline Goodwill, 11:00 a.m.I've succumbed to the temptation to write an application for my Windows Mobile phone. Bob help me. It's actually pretty easy with Visual Studio.Nibs seems to think that after I move out, as she wants, I'm going to do the same amount of step 'n fetching around here as always. That's a no. A definite no. I'm pretty sure I'm not being unreasonable here.

My Internet access fled during the night. More Verizon techs are coming to the Abbey this morning. Nibs is displeased, because she needs it for work. Possibly a bad pair in the cable to the Abbey office, because the phone on the other pair works fine.

Still badgeless, and low on sleep.

And why would chickens rip your lips off? Because they don't have any of their own.

-Lost badge. Have turned the Abbey upside down for it, because it's almost certainly in here somewhere.

+I have fiber optic internet now. 10 Mbps down, 2 up. Aw yeah. I'm sucking a mix down now.-It took the Verizon techs twelve hours at my house to make it work, and the jacks still have no faceplates. They're coming back tomorrow.

+All sewing on the costume is finished! Just a little ironing and I'm really finished.

I see for the second time that webmonkeying is an activity with a long tail: you can make decreasingly time-consuming changes forever. I've also seen evidence supporting cow's opinion that PHP works like a student project.

Passed through Fry's (ah, temptation) like a dose of salts and picked up flash drives for cheap so Nibs could hand out her portfolio to editors. The smallest capacity I could find, which was more than a hundred times what I needed, was bigger than the ones I used to use as backup media, which will also be given away. Moral: keep widgets if they don't take up much space and still work.

Must get a solar-powered theremin kit for m'boy. And where did I get the idea? November Dorkbot, which we will not be attending. Y'know, if I were my son's one and only, he'd get to do stuff like this on school nights as long as he finished his homework first. I worry about how narrow his horizons are compared to what mine were like at his age.

The objective I was trying to achieve during my recent tragic loss of data has been achieved, meaning that working from home just got a whole lot easier. (Tip: if you're using remote desktop over a VPN, you need to join a domain if you want it to work. This may be true only of clients running Vista.) As for the data loss itself, Nibs says she has "made it right". I still feel bad about it, though.

Second iPod reload in as many months of about 20 GB. It got nice and warm. I wonder how much data you can pump into one before it bursts into flames.

Needed: sleep, sewing time, and socializing. Three S's.

Still not going to Burning Man this year. No half-naked fairy coated in alkaline dust gave me a ticket, ride, and time. Le sigh. I guess I'll have to be my own fairy next year.

I'd like to be able to use remote desktop from my new computer into work, which means I needed to upgrade to a release of Vista that is higher than Home Premium. All was hunky dory until I logged in as me and got the message, "Preparing your desktop."

That's a euphemism for wiping your files, apparently unrecoverably.

OK, wiping mine are OK, because I have copies of most of them on the laptop and can download & regenerate the rest. The trouble is, Nibs' files got wiped in a similar fashion. No prob: I back her up daily to flash drives. (Yeah, I should have made a backup right before I upgraded, but didn't.)

Prob: unbeknownst to me, the last backup that actually ran was early Friday morning.Bigger prob: she did an important interview later that day.Punch line: remote desktop still doesn't work.

Yes, sure, I could have prevented this, but a warning or a recovery option would have been nice. All my apps and many of my settings made it through the upgrade unscathed. Why not my files somewhere?

Small yay: according to SETI@Home, I've crunched more numbers for them in the last month than I did in the previous eight years. That's a hundred-fold increase in compute power.

But first: every so often I have to wear 5" heels to remind myself why I only wear 5" heels every so often.

The new 'pooter is here, and it's everything I'd hoped for. The only real glitch in the various installations was that I have a PS/2 keyboard, and this box has only USB ports, which an $20 widget takes care of. (Good thing the company store isn't open weekends, or I might have bought another keyboard when I biked down there.) The specs:

Just got word from Nibs that the much-delayed (several years plus two weeks from Dell) new computer is in the Abbey. Let the Great Data Migration begin. If I'm a little out of touch for a day or two, you can know that I'm happily installing stuff.

Bah: an unanticipated new garage door opener, but I have to admit that it's nice to have one that a) works, b) is quiet, and c) has a working light in it. For the record, the Genie brand isn't so good, says the dude who replaced it.

Yay: a long-anticipated new 'pooter. The desktop that I'm typing on right now is over ten (10) years old. Oedipa's been a good machine, but she's awfully long in the tooth: Win2K, which many peripheral vendors no longer support even if MS does; USB 1 at a whopping 12 MB/sec; and her now-anemic 80GB of hard disk is twenty times what she came to us with.

Yay: My check was bigger than most of yours because I have a Wendling.

I got my Java FFT viewer working - plugging the mike into the right jack was a big help - while the Wendling was wandering around. I got to show him spectrograms of his own speech, and tell him how you can mix sounds the way you mix colors. I don't know how much of it sank in because he seemed more interested in the playback button, but still, score one for math & 'pooters. By the way, the app runs like molasses.

Yay: lots of places to go & people to seeBah: not enough time -- Nibs was acting spooked, so I didn't ask.

Yay: DJ Catherine Jade rocked my socks at Z House.Yay: peeps at nerdvanaYay: yuppie eats at Z HouseYay: less yuppie eats at nerdvanaYay: Adding stays improved the Doc Martens corset. niac took a good photo of it, which I'll post as soon as I have it.

You know you've let the documents to be shredded pile up too long when you overheat your paper shredder four times before you finally get through them all.

In the twenty-first century, you can order a jigsaw puzzle of a map (an old USGS topographical map, actually) of your vicinity. It's only 400 pieces, but they're 400 pieces of pure evil. We got it for m'boy, but it kicked the butts of three adults including me. I now know where every park in town is.

Thank Bob the water heater situation isn't an emergency. Everyone who knows anything about them seems to have taken the week off.

And Bob help me, I really have been working on an FFT viewer in Java. I shudder to think how long it would have taken me to figure out how to record from the mike without looking at Sun's demo code.